For defence the broch was as nearly as possible perfect against any engines or weapons then available for attacking it; and we may note that it existed in Scotland and mainly in the north and west of it, and nowhere else in the world.8 It was a roofless block-house, aptly described by Dr. Joseph Anderson as a "safe." It could not be battered down or set on fire, and if an enemy got inside it, he would find himself in a sort of trap surrounded by the defenders of the broch, and a mark for their missiles. The broch, too, was quite distinct from the lofty, narrow ecclesiastical round tower, of which examples still are found in Ireland, and in Scotland at Brechin and Abernethy.
To resist invasion the Picts would be armed with spears, short swords and dirks, but, save perhaps a targe, were without defensive body armour, which they scorned to use in battle, preferring to fight stripped. They belonged to septs and clans, and each sept would have its Maor, and each clan or province its Maormor9 or big chief, succession being derived through females, a custom which no doubt originated in remote pre-Christian ages when the paternity of children was uncertain.
Being Celts, the Picts would shun the open sea. They feared it, for they had no chance on it, as their vessels were often merely hides stretched on wattles, resembling enlarged coracles. Yet with such rude ships as they had, they reached Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes and Iceland as hermits or missionaries.10 In Norse times they never had the mastery of the sea, and the Pictish navy is a myth of earlier days.11
Lastly, as we have seen, the Picts of Cat had never been conquered, nor had their land ever been occupied by the legions of Rome, which had stopped at the furthest in Moray; and the sole traces of Rome in Cat are, as stated, two plates of hammered brass found in a Sutherland broch, and some Samian ware. Further, Christian though he had been long before Viking times, the Pict of Cat derived his Christianity at first and chiefly from the Pictish missions, and later from the Columban Church, both without reference to Papal Rome; and his missionaries not only settled on islands off his coasts, but later on worshipped in his small churches on the mainland; and many a Pictish saint of holy life was held in reverence there.
About the eighth century and probably earlier, immigrants from the southern shores of the Baltic pressed the Norse westwards in Norway, and later on over-population in the sterile lands which lie along Norway's western shores, drove its inhabitants forth from its western fjords north of Stavanger and from The Vik or great bay of the Christiania Fjord, whence they may have derived their name of Vikings, across the North Sea to the opposite coasts of Shetland, Orkney and Cat, where they found oxen and sheep to slaughter on the nesses or headlands, and stores of grain, and some silver and even gold in the shrines and on the persons of those whom they attacked, and in still later days they sought new lands over the sea and permanent settlements, where they would have no scat to pay to any overlord or feudal superior.
When the Vikings landed, superior discipline, instilled into them by their training on board ship, superior arms, the long two-handed sword and the spear and battle-axe and their deadly bows and arrows, and superior defensive armour, the long shield, the helmet and chain-mail, would make them more than a match for their adversaries.12 Above all, the greater ferocity of these Northmen, ruthlessly directed to its object by brains of the highest order, would render the Pictish farmer, who had wife and children, and home and cattle and crops to save, an easy prey to the Viking warrior bands, and the security of his broch would of itself tend to a passive and inactive, rather than an offensive, and therefore successful defence.
After long continued raids, the Vikings no doubt saw that much of the land along the shore was fair and fertile compared with their own, and finally they came not merely to plunder and depart, but to settle and stay. When they did so, they came in large numbers and with organised forces13 and carefully prepared plans of campaign, and with great reserves of weapons on board their ships; and having the ocean as their highway, they could select their points of attack. They then, as we know from the localities which bear their place-names, cleared out the Pict from most of his brochs and from the best land in Cat, shown on the map by dark green colour, that is, from all cultivated land below the 500 feet level save the upper parts of the valleys; or they slew or enslaved the Pict who remained. Lastly, on settling, they would seize his women-kind and wed them; for the women of their own race were not allowed on Viking ships, and were probably less amenable and less charming to boot. But the Pictish women thus seized had their revenge. The darker race prevailed, and, the supply of fathers of pure Norse blood being renewed only at intervals, the children of such unions soon came to be mainly of Celtic strain, and their mothers doubtless taught them to speak the Gaelic, which had then for at least a century superseded the Pictish tongue. The result was a mixed race of Gall-gaels or Gaelic strangers, far more Celtic than Norse, who soon spoke chiefly Gaelic, save in north-east Ness. Their Gaelic, too, like the English of Shetland at the present time, would not only be full of old Norse words, especially for things relating to the sea, but be spoken with a slight foreign accent. How numerous those foreign words still are in Sutherland Gaelic, the late Mr. George Henderson has ably and elaborately proved in his scholarly book on "Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland." We find traces of Norse words and the Norse accent and inflexions also on the Moray seaboard, on which the Norse gained a hold. The same would be true of the people on the western lands and islands of the Hebrides.
As time went on, the Gaelic strain predominated more and more, especially on the mainland of Scotland, over the Gall, or foreign, strain, which was not maintained. Mr. A.W. Johnston, in his "Orkney and Shetland Folk—850 to 1350,"14 has worked out the quarterings of the Norse jarls, of whom only the first three were pure Norsemen, and he has thus shown conclusively how very Celtic they had become long before their male line failed. The same process was at work, probably to a greater extent, among those of lower rank, who could not find or import Norse wives, if they would, as the jarls frequently did.
One or two other introductory points remain to be noted and borne in mind throughout.
We must beware of thinking that all the land in an earldom such as Cat was the absolute property of the chief, as in the nineteenth century, or the latter half of it, was practically true in the modern county of Sutherland. The fact was very much otherwise. The Maormor and afterwards the earl doubtless had demesne lands, but he was in early times, ex officio, mainly a superior and receiver of dues for his king;15 and this possibly shows why very early Scottish earldoms, as for instance that of Sutherland, in the absence of male heirs, often descended to females, unless the grant or custom excluded them. It was quite different with later feudal baronies or tenancies, where military service, which only males could render, was due, and which with rare exceptions it was, after about 1130, the policy of the Scottish kings to create; and in the case of baronies or lordships the land itself was often described and given to the grantee and his heirs by metes and bounds, in return for specified military service, and his heirs male were exhausted before any female could inherit.
In Ness and in the rest of Cat there were many Norse and native holders of land within the earldom, and much tribal ownership. Duncan of Duncansby or Dungall of Dungallsby, as he is variously called, allowed part at least of his dominions to pass by marriage to the Norse jarls; but both Moddan and Earl Ottar, whose heir was Earl Erlend Haraldson, who left no heir, owned land extensively in Ness and elsewhere, while Moddan "in Dale" had daughters also owning land, one of whom, Frakark, widow of Liot Nidingr, had many homesteads in upper Kildonan in Sudrland and elsewhere, and possibly it is her sister Helga's name that lingers in a place-name lower down that strath near Helmsdale, at Helgarie.
What is worthy of notice is that it is clear from the place-names that after the Norse conquest the Norse held and named most of the lower or seaward parts of the valleys and nearly all the coast lands of Cat and Ross as far south as the Beauly Firth, and the Picts occupied and were never dispossessed of the upper parts of the valleys or the hills all through the Norse occupation. In other words, as conquerors coming from the sea, the Norsemen seized and held the better Pictish lands near the coast, which had been cultivated for centuries, and on which crops would ripen with regularity